Spiritual But Not Religious: Language of Reverence, Part III

Sermon

I’m tempted to just launch in, because that’s a lot of ground to cover, but let’s pause a moment to center ourselves and contextualize this theme. Language of reverence and the need, perhaps for a new language of reverence, was first raised a few years ago by a UU minister and theologian, the Rev. David Bumbaugh. He raised it as a humanist concern – that we needed new language to express reverence and engage with other religious movements, and that this language ought rightly to be grounded in a humanist tradition of wonder, inquiry and scientific discovery. He talked about this path as one that invites us out of our small selves and into the largest self, the self that produced the universe, the self that through time connects everything living on this planet, the self that will be our future. (Toward a Humanist Vocabulary of Reverence, 2001)

As you probably have heard from me already, this theme was picked up by our UU Association president, Bill Sinkford, and expanded on with a twist. President Sinkford wanted to suggest that a new language of reverence might embrace religious language; that our movement had matured enough to allow for a depth of reflection and expression that would include religious language more explicitly as part of owning our place in the religious spectrum of America. This got misreported in local papers as a proposal to insert ‘God’ into our principles and purposes, which was not Bill’s plan. He wasn’t plugging one form of expression, or location for that expression, nor one religious slant such as Christianity, but he was plugging the unapologetic use of religious words like God more broadly than he thinks we generally use them, to express our sense of the holy in our lives. (The Language of Faith, 2003)

Rev. Bumbaugh responded in an address at the Boston General Assembly, making the point that typically religious language was exactly what he was suggesting we leave behind, and offering more examples of the humanist vision he had for our new UU language of reverence. He said gently but unequivocally that President Sinkford was wrong in turning to old religious language, particularly out of the Jewish and Christian traditions, reiterated his sense that the universe story is also the human story and it is the story and language we ought to be focussing on.

I talked in my first sermon about whether we need a language of reverence at all, and why. I talked in my second sermon about ways language from Judaism, Christianity and the bible still held value, and what might come from abjuring that language.

I should say that I generally start my sermons with a question rather than an answer, and the answer comes in the research, reflection and writing of the sermon. So it wasn’t a foregone conclusion to me what answers I would find in considering this issue, though I realize in retrospect that the answers I am finding are congruent with who I am and what moves me. A number of other people have responded to this issue in the years since it first got onto the continental radar screen of our faith, and their responses are congruent with who they are and what moves them.

Thandeka, an eminent professor and theologian at our Meadville-Lombard UU seminary in Chicago is very focussed on embodied worship and religious experience. Her essay, "New Words for Life," was also delivered at the Boston General Assembly. It considers the history of Unitarian Universalism via the original positions of 19th century Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing and 19th century Universalist minister, Hosea Ballou. Channing’s theology was about the mind; he believed the human essence was the mind. Ballou’s theology incorporated the body as well as the mind, believing that the body was the occasion for much "human" experience and also for much human sin, therefore that the body had to be taken into account theologically. Fast forward through Martin Luther’s introduction of conscience or human nature as a religious tool, and Schliermacher’s investigation of the biology of religion with his conception of religious affect reflecting or even encompassing religious experience, (or don’t, read it at your leisure, but for the purposes of this sermon, fast forward must be my mode here) and we arrive at what Thandeka calls "Affect Theology."

Affect Theology is based on recognition of the psyche-soma or mind-body continuum, and pays great attention to whether that continuum is connected and flowing or not, operating instead as a disconnect. Healthy, expressive connection makes for more comprehensive and fulfilling religious experience. She uses powerful words, like sin and salvation, so loaded as to be rarely found in UU discourse these days. Sin she redefines as "the disembodiment of self" which results in "an inability to remain in community openheartedly." Sin is the "broken state of the self and the world." "Genocide and racism," she says, "sexism and classism – the sins of humanity against itself – are born of massive collective eruptions of discordant human affections." Salvation is experiencing "sustained, expansive, interaffective system of communication" that allows people to: nurture themselves through interacting empathetically with others; be aware of others and open to negotiation and interchange; and create a communication system that "articulates and advances a social justice agenda for all." Thandeka concludes: "All of our theologies describe the diversity of our life experiences. Remember this diversity. Pay attention to the social contexts. Keep eyes focused on the people. Speak with compassionate understanding and our new words for life will include us all, ever anew." (New Words for Lives, 2003)

In redefining such laden words as sin and salvation, Thandeka is explicitly pouring new wine into old wineskins. She takes pains with it, perhaps because the terms are so stigmatized in our liberal religious tradition. She makes interesting points and her discourse on Affect Theology does hold water – or perhaps wine -- but it seems more like pastoral psychology than theology. Her points are about the self in relation to experience and to others, but not about the self in relation to what is beyond knowing and beyond the mere selves of others. Her foundation is humanist and also science-based, as Rev. Bumbaugh seeks, but for all its inclusion here in a body of writing about reverence, there is little reverence expressed in her theological system. Explanations and studies abound, but transcendence is not present at the table she sets for us, at least not, to use her terms, as I have experienced it, not, as it has provoked in me, reverence and a yearning to express that reverence. Because I am too, at heart, a Romantic with a capital "R", I have little problem with the assertion made by poets and philosophers of that movement that what one feels must be true – but what I feel is not just about me, nor just about my world and fellow beings. Though my feelings often originate there, my sense of transcendence and reverence points beyond what may be quantified or defined, and I need a theology that honors that and a language that reflects that, howsoever difficult it is to do so.

And it is also, perhaps, not present as Rev. Bumbaugh meant it. Our reading this morning summed up his Boston talk, and he makes the point there that "reverence is not something that comforts us, nor is it a tool to further personal or institutional agendas. It is not a means to an end, it is an end itself, an unbidden reaction, in response to our place in the universe." He is not concerned about reverence expressible in empathy and social agendas, but with reverence as a great yet discrete experience; it may motivate some further expression or none at all.

If we accept Rev. Bumbaugh’s parameters and do not pour new wine into old wineskins, neither redefining old language nor locating our language in that of the psychology that reflects personal agendas, nor the mission language that reflects institutional agendas, where do we find our language of reverence? (For that matter, what right have we even to continue to use terms out of Christianity or Judaism if we are more defined by our renunciation of those traditions than our respect for them?) So then, let’s say we follow Rev. Bumbaugh and are thus defined by our renunciation of those traditions out of a right, as well as out of any desire, to use that language. What does that leave us with for language of reverence?

Do we borrow it? Apart from the Western traditions we reviewed in the last sermon, what about using words from other world religions and traditions? How would the ethics of interfaith appropriation pertain to such adoption? Or do we create it? Do we need new language – new words, or at least little-used words, that we can employ with such power and care that they enter and enhance religious understanding or dialogue with as much significance as other Jewish and Christian terms have had in religious history?

Let’s start with borrowing. What if we drew on other world religions? What if we set out to use or regain or incorporate different words from other faiths or traditions, language that has not been co-opted, as Rev. Bumbaugh charges, in the modern West to support political agendas and initiatives that go against what we hold most dear? Would we speak more of our Dao? In fact, in many ways Dao is an ultimately compelling and very UU concept. Dao means "way" or "path" and refers to the natural way or order of things in the universe. Daoism was revealed by Lao Tzu in his book the Dao De JingDaoists believe people can and should seek harmony with each other and with nature, particularly by seeking to live a calm and modest life of meditation and reflection, following wuwei, by refusing to engage in aggressive or thoughtless activity and emotion. This balance is illustrated in the famous yin-yang symbol many of us are already familiar with. There is, of course, a lot more to Daoism than this, and not all of it is quite so appealing. Nonetheless, much of it fits easily with UU theology and values, even if its terms need to be followed by an explanatory phrase each time we cite them. The explanatory phrases might or might not diminish as we used the terms and became more familiar with the nuances of wuwei. Given our prediliction for redefinitions and renaming, I’m not sure that the need for explanation and reconsideration would change for us UU’s no matter how consistently we might use Daoist terms, particularly if we used them for public discourse.

But it’s not just Daoism. We could try Buddhism or Hinduism…and surely having to define our terms is old hat for us by now? But whatever the terms we chose, would we feel able to nuance those definitions differently so as to reflect our own faith? Would we begin to speak of enlightenment instead of revelation, and samsara instead of sin? Would we still be Unitarian Universalist if we did. And let’s go back to that complex issue of interfaith appropriation. If we are sometimes uncomfortable with honoring aspects of heritages we actually do descend from, such as Judaism, then what right would we have we to use Dao or Nirvana or wuwei or samsara generally in our movement. Most of all, what right would we have to change how they are understood so as to better suit and reflect our different faith? It’s interesting to speculate, and I could go on, but I won’t because everything tells me we wouldn’t do it, and we couldn’t do it, and most of all, that it is not so much fresh ground for us to till as a different crop than what we raise, and so we shouldn’t do it.

Rev. Bumbaugh suggests the lexicon and discoveries of science as the grounding for our new language of reverence. But even his own writing on this topic depends on traditional western religious concepts, and inserting examples from science as illustrations for those concepts. " …the universe itself is continually incarnating itself in mircrobes and maples, in hummingbirds and human beings, constantly inviting us to tease out the revelation contained in stars and atoms and every living thing." What makes that sentence religious are two words: incarnating, and revelation – we hear them, we are meant to hear them, with all the echoes of their old and traditional meanings sounding in them. We are still relying on the language he would eschew unless we change not only the illustrations, but the concepts contextualizing the illustrations. Do we possibly seek then new words altogether? Might we seek, for instance, to grok each other, as they did so powerfully and memorably in the novel Stranger in a Strange Land? It’s a term I’m sure some UU’s could get behind. As defined by whatis.com:
"To grok (pronounced GRAHK) something is to understand something so well that it is fully absorbed into oneself. In Robert Heinlein's science-fiction novel of 1961, the word is Martian and literally means ‘to drink’ but metaphorically means ‘to take it all in,’ to understand fully, or to ‘be at one with.’ Today, grok sometimes is used to include acceptance as well as comprehension - to ‘dig’ or appreciate as well as to know. As one character from Heinlein's novel says:
'Grok' means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed - to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in group experience. It means almost everything that we mean by religion, philosophy, and science - and it means as little to us (because we are from Earth) as color means to a blind man.’"

In the book, the advent of the Martian and his language and its understandings effects enormous change on Earth. Many people get right into grokking on all levels: physical, emotional, psychological, spiritual. I confess that when I read this book years ago it looked a lot like free love to my puritanical yankee and youthful mind, and I couldn’t bear it, and could only be glad that this character and his concepts weren’t actually effecting the changes they were in the book. It’s not fair to use an invented word that created revulsion in me as a possible example of new language – well, it’s not fair to me anyway, because I still feel a visceral antipathy when I think of the word. But plenty of other people in the book, and actual readers of the book, thought it was pretty cool. Certainly the word has potential religious application and it’s a famous word and an invented word and there aren’t a lot of words that possess all those qualities, so it’s what we’re stuck with. New words enter our vocabulary all the time though, and are quickly invested with meaning. The advent of personal computers has brought a host of words into our consciousness: we google something, we boot systems, they crash, we reboot them. We surf the net. We I-M friends. We download and upload and reload. We don’t deload, we delete, and that’s an old word, but it just goes to show you how flexible and inclusive modern, created language can be.

Well, we might be able to do that with religion – and if someone wants to take it on, I’ll be a fascinated observer. But in the end, there’s a crucial difference; religion is not new and religion is about backstories as much as about timeless human experience or contemporary human opportunities and suffering. I cannot imagine religion without history. We see ourselves as walking around like Jacob Marley, laden with chains of traditional religious language and their applications, but in the end they are not only sobering reminders of all that has been done wrong in this world by ourselves and others, they also give us weight and substance and tangible symbolism which we may turn to our advantage when and if we choose.

We’re left, then with reverence and yearning and the need, still, to express it. Two solutions that have appeal belong to two other UU ministers, Rev. Laurel Hallman and Rev. Kendall Gibbons. The Rev. Dr. Laurel Hallman gave the 2003 Berry Street Essay at General Assembly. Guess what she talked about? Yep, language of reverence. In her address, she cites the philosopher Suzanne Langer, saying "If, as Langer asserts, language is a relational system, with associations forming themselves around a more concretized concept, then it is hubris for us to believe that we can cut out some words, and put others on the back burner, for they will find their way back into consciousness, often in surprising ways." She’s talking, I think, about that point regarding the concepts embedded in language and how they remain even if we change the illustration of the concept.

Laurel Hallman has a different solution to the challenge of reverent language. She says, "What we need to do, then, is to break open these concretized words, to juxtapose them with words that create cognitive dissonance. For it is in the spaces between the juxtapositions that new associations are created." She goes on to give an example: "The first inkling I had of this was when we began to use the pronoun She with reference to God. People laughed nervously when they heard this for the first time. People laughed. It was so strange. So odd.

The idea that metaphors that have suffered misplaced concreteness can be brought to life by simply juxtaposing them in surprising ways is almost too simple. It creates a cognitive dissonance in the listener that breaks them open--not to new definitions of God, or whatever element of mystery you are attempting to point toward, but to a small portion of reality that they have experienced. Remember, we're talking about the religious existential dimension of life, not rigid definitions. We're talking about the products of the imagination here. We're pointing, not positing"”

An example of what she’s talking about is the poem, The Rowing Endeth, by Anne Sexton which we heard earlier in the service. (ALOR, p. 32-33) It illustrates the power of such juxtaposition, using both the vital history of religious language, and the freshness that can come as, depending on how you use it. At the end of her essay, Hallman writes:
"We not only need to invite poets into the rooms of our hearts, but we need to invite our spiritual ancestors as well. They are raising a hand, wanting to be heard. If we say, "We'll listen, but don't use any words that have become solidified in the meantime, no matter how fulsome [sic] they were for you," we will have cut ourselves off, not only from our spiritual DNA, but also from one part of the conversation that we desperately need to have."

The Rev. Kendyl Gibbons responded to Bumbaugh's talk at General Assembly. Gibbons is another well-known humanist within the denomination. Her response to this issue is to suggest using the traditional western languages of reverence without taking them literally. In fact, she points to them as sources of human wisdom that serve the humanist purpose. "To think that we must dispense with all traditional language and symbols," she said, "is to assume that no human beings were ever before so clever or so profound, or so committed, as we are." "Our wonder is not our own, but echoes down the history of the whole human race. Genuine human language is a collective human enterprise."

Her analysis aligns her with one last resource we must consider in this service: Jesus scholar and professor of religion Marcus Borg. In his book The Heart of Christianity, Borg makes the point that we tend to define religion as either absolutist or reductionist (relativist). But, he points out, there is a third way: sacramental, wherein religions are themselves sacraments of the sacred. "As sacraments," he writes, "the religions are not ‘absolute.’ Rather, like the bread and wine of the Eucharist, they are finite products, finite means, of mediating the sacred." (THOC, p. 213) As such finite means, religions have seven qualities.

1. They are human creations.
2. They are responses to experiences of the sacred.
3. They are cultural-linguistic traditions with a complete world-view, history, etc.
4. They are wisdom traditions with foundational understandings about what is real and what is the right way.
5. They are aesthetic traditions with their own sense of beauty and truth.
6. They are communities of practice.
7. They are communities of transformation – both for the self and the world

All these characteristics are ways that enduring religions mediate the absolute, but are not the absolute themselves. The point, then, is to live within the (in his case Christian) tradition as a sacrament of the sacred, a mediator of the absolute, whom we may name God. (THOC, P. 211-225). His thoughts are helpful because they reminds us, as did Gibbons, of the fundamentally human nature of all religion, of the inherent humanity, capacity and flexibility that endures in world religions. Those qualities are important arguments for all languages of reverence possessing deep wells of meaning, too deep to have been plumbed, too vast to have been fully tainted.

Borg concludes by affirming his own Christianity, though noting that it is not the only way, not the only legitimate mediator of the absolute. I conclude by affirming my Unitarian Universalism which is so heavily influenced by ancient Greek religion, by early Christianity and by ancient and modern Judaism. So influenced by Judaism, in fact, that a major reason I am not a rabbi is only that Judaism is not enough for me. I cannot give up Christmas, I cannot give up some aspects of Jesus’ life and message, I cannot give up the ancient Greek gods and the mythology which was theology and still points to the power and sacredness of nature. Likewise I cannot give up the bible and I don’t want to, and because I am Unitarian Universalist, I don’t have to. I can embrace Judaism rather than feel trammeled by it, because it is not all I embrace. I am, in fact, freed to take as much as I can from whatever sources and language offer meaning. That is part of our faith – that no once source constrains us, that no one can dictate our seeking or our sources for expression, inspiration or reverence. We do not locate our language of reverence only in biblical or western religious sources, nor only in an Eastern source, nor only in poetry nor only in the New York Times nor NPR. Any of these is grounds for a sermon or a reading, inspiration or revelation, even salvation. The bible is not defined for me by anyone else. Neither is it defiled for me by anyone else.

Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honorable, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report, if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things. – Philippians, chapter 4.

Amen.